


Persephone's Voice

by belle0511



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Feminist Themes, Gen, Poetry, Revisionist Mythmaking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-17
Updated: 2013-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-04 22:10:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1086235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belle0511/pseuds/belle0511
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A poem expressing my feelings about the myth of Persephone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Persephone's Voice

**Author's Note:**

> Product of an English major with too many feelings about mythological characters.

The ancient Greeks didn’t have the Hubble telescope  
Or the Mars rover, and its digital renderings of alien landscapes.  
They had no science textbooks full of facts and figures  
Of orbital cycles and solstices and suns.

So when they tried to understand   
what caused the seasons  
They told a story.

People love stories, after all  
And how better to explain the natural world  
Than to tell a story about what made it,   
What defines it.

Persephone, we learn, hasn’t her own story.  
Not really.  
She is a portion of her mother’s story, doled out,  
Like pieces of information we must string together  
To make a whole.

In Ovid’s tale Persephone never speaks.  
She is only that which is spoken about.

Her mother, Demeter, we learn is the goddess of the harvest,  
Persephone, her daughter, is just what Demeter owns, then lost.

Hades sees her, wants to possess her, so he takes her.  
Conveys her away down below, as if he just has the right.

There is no spring there, no life at all.  
Except, of course, for the pomegranate,   
traitorous seeds and all.

Demeter is so distraught by her daughter’s absence  
She punishes the earth – taking out her grief and pain,  
And the whole world suffers and dies in the cold.

Because that is entirely rational.

Meanwhile Persephone is in the underworld, being bargained for  
Like the property she is.

Some call this an illustration of a mother’s devotion,  
That she would move the entire world to get back the child she lost

Some call it a love story,  
That the passion of Hades is so immense  
He cannot bear to be parted from what he desires.

I call it horrifying.

 

In the end the arbiter strikes an agreement  
Demeter and Hades can live with -   
(Persephone herself conspicuously absent from the negotiations)  
The captor gets to keep his stolen possession for a time,  
And the mother gets to possess it in her turn.

When Persephone returns her mother rejoices, and   
Now the earth can be young and beautiful like  
The desolate daughter who caused so much strife  
By being young and beautiful.

But like all things this story is a cycle -  
And when it repeats the daughter is discarded  
Once more, into the depths   
To serve her penance for pomegranate seeds.

So in the end we have a wrathful, punitive mother  
And an entitled, self-absorbed consumer.  
Both of whom believe the girl in question exists only to   
Serve their own ends.

We are left concluding that the Ancient Greeks, while  
Perhaps not in possession of the charts and rovers and telescopes  
Did have, by examination,  
An astounding knowledge of the human heart. 

What they lacked in knowledge of technology,  
They made up for in knowledge of depravity.

But if I leave it there I am just as guilty   
Of reducing her to a symbol, illustration  
And still she has no autonomy, no agency.

So if I could re-write her story I would start by giving her a story.

Where she has capacity, where she IS

I would give her a voice.

I would gift her words.

And the first thing I would have her say is:

“No.”

“I will not. 

I, by and of myself, refuse.

I am.

I can.

I decide.

I choose.

I decline.

I don’t even like pomegranates.”


End file.
